Tuesday, 14 October 2008

Kifu for windows and kifubase is the best shogi game record management software there is,though as it's in Japanese it's difficult to decipher, though there is a webpage that refers to Kakinoki shogi VII , that can be used to explain how to use this software too, as it's very similar.Click here to view.Incidentally,there is a sample version of Kakinoki Shogi VIII,that can be used to view your saved games in a pleasanter interface, and even in the sample edition will analyse a game position if you key in Ctrl+H.An advantage that kifu for windows has over shogidokoro is that it will let you create branches to input into the kifu file to help in your analysis of a game,for example from the hint analysis that Kakinoki shogi VIII will provide you with.Another free program that as well as providing good AI on many different levels to play against,will also analyse a game position is K-Shogi.It also has a tsume solver, as does Kakinoki VIII in the sample edition.For K-shogi , just go to the 7th tab from the left, and click the first link down for game analysis, and second link down for tsume solver. You will need to learn kifu(shogi game score in japanese format) from a great site called shogi-shack to understand the analysis.To play a game against K-Shogi, it's the second tab from the left, and first link down.The default setting is human v human so just alter either sente or gote to the required level to play against it.K-shogi has been strong in the computer shogi championship, that's why I'm mentioning it in detail, and also it's free.

To optimise the functionality of these Japanese programs, on your computer go to:start,control panel,regional and language options(in classic view menu),then format everything there to japanese,otherwise you may find the programs don't work properly.Just remember to reset them back again to your default language, so that other programs you have like for instance Excel don't have the date format etc. affected.(I'm using windows 7 operating system at the moment and could only install kakinoki shogi VIII after changing the system locale to Japanese.After double clicking k801 demo,this should extract another folder, then simply double click the set up application icon within the extracted folder which should be 59kb.)

If you play a game on yahoo japan, you can have the kifu e-mailed to you, then copy and paste it from the e-mail into Kifu for Windows to save and replay.